September 26, 2023

NESTED! Salmon chaos, camelopards, big-breasted trains, climate emotions

Hi friends, it’s Victor! I haven’t sent a letter in a while, but today I’m one year older, had the day off, and thought that besides spending the day eating I should share the many things I’ve chanced upon in the last couple months. It’s a busy one, but I tried to keep it concise. Happy autumn!

Wikipedia is the best website

• The Man of the Hole was a Brazilian indigenous man who lived on his own for almost 30 years, after the rest of his people were killed.

• Gruinard Island, in the Scottish Highlands, was covered in anthrax by the British military to test the feasibility of bioweapons during the Second World War. It remained contaminated until 1990.

• It’s a linguist’s wildest dream: there was a Basque–Icelandic pidgin in the 17th century.

• As part of a two-day promotion in 2021, a Taiwanese chain started to offer free sushi to people who had the (Chinese) word for ‘salmon’ in their name. Subsequently, at least 332 people changed their legal name to include “salmon”, thus inducing the salmon chaos incident.

• Shit life syndrome or SLS is a phrase used by doctors to describe the effect of poverty or abuse on some of their patients.

• There was a long-held misconception that California was an island.

• A couple of years ago, a Danish museum commissioned an artist to reproduce an artwork made out of banknotes, and supplied him with £62,000 to do so. He handed in two blank canvasses and called the artwork “Take the Money and Run”.

• A list of the deadliest animals to humans. (Sharks and bears don't make the cut.)

It’s getting cold

Mildly interesting

• Randomly found out that in the late 14th century, giraffes were called camelopards.

• Is it OK to have a child? In this economy?

• No one’s talking online now, and we're all lurkers.

• I feel like people who collect Le Creuset cookware should find better uses of their money, but I’m only saying this because I’m jealous. (Absolute mood: “I look forward to the day when I can pass down my items to a family member. But not my braiser… I want to be buried with it.”)

• In North America, a bunch of cities’ street lighting has mysteriously shifted to purple. (Saving you a click: the mystery is poor QA on the part of the LED manufacturers’ supply chain).

• A German supermarket has tried for a week to charge the “true climate cost” of certain foods that are currently subsidised, or should be less of a commodity.

• The world’s longest continually active torrent file has now been online for 20 years, and it still has over a hundred seeders. It is the ‘official’ release of “The Fanimatrix”, an amateur homage/sequel made by a group of friends, who needed a way to share it in a pre-YouTube world.

  - There’s now a copy on YouTube if you don’t fancy torrenting it, and it’s not that bad for a “limited budget of just $800, nearly half of which was spent on a leather jacket”.

Everything is depressing

• Yes, there’s already a large community of people making DIY chatbots that remove LLM’s ethical restrictions for horny purposes and… inventive role play (includes big-breasted trains and thick jellyfish girls).

  - And quite frankly it still seems more ethical than media sites who just decided that ChatGPT is just better than paying writers. Cue The AV Club directly copying IMDb, and MSN calling a deceased NBA player “useless”.

• Two moms are kicking off a class action lawsuit against Roblox, alleging that it facilitates a kid casino. (They’re right and I hope they win!)

• YouTube and Facebook are following X’s lead and giving up on policing conspiracies. I’m sure that will go great for the world at large.

• What to do with your climate emotions.

  - Preppers are not going to make it either.

Good to look at

• For gay Ukrainians, the war is not going to stop them from hooking up and I love this for them.

• I really liked Shon Fay’s heartfelt newsletter on the changing definition of addiction.

• Another argument against land ownership which suggests that in a few centuries, land ownership may be regarded as an odd historical reality as absurd and retrograde as serfdom looks to us.

  - Relatedly: Plato’s cave regrets to inform you it will be raising its rent.

• Man Called Fran is a great short story that has it all (and by “all” I mean plumbing, fireworks and crackheads).

• A short but somehow fascinating history of the branded breakfast and Quaker Oats.

• New Word Order is a fun game that makes you guess which phrase appeared first in the history of the world (with often surprising results).

Work! Design! Tech!

• Some great UX design patterns for loading content.

• The playbook for universal design is a rich resource with different methods and tips to include more people in your designs.

• How to be a “servant-leader” without burning out.

• If you’re in the market: some great tips to avoid sabotaging your salary negotiation before you even start.

Wishing you a kinder internet,

Victor